Biathlon shooting 1
- Engelhardt
- 16. April 2019
- 17:21
In previous posts, I have addressed some of the more technical basics of biathlon shooting. I will continue to pursue this in the future to continue to provide impetus to rethink the basic work in biathlon shooting training.
However, this article deals with why biathlon shooting should not be neglected as one of the two components of the complex performance in biathlon. In my view, this tendency is unfortunately currently visible in the German biathlon.
Principles
The biathlon training has to be basically strictly oriented to the competition structure. For the cross-country skiing part, this is the orientation towards a medium endurance ability in combination with the corresponding cross-country technical skills. Beside this, the goal of the shooting part is a hit rate of 100% of the competition shots fired. An important factor in the planning and design of the training is the relationship between the skiing and shooting performance to be achieved. For this purpose, the skiing performance is considered in terms of distance and the shooting performance in terms of the number of competition shots.
Development of the ratio of skiing and shooting performance
In the past, there has been a steady quantitative increase in the number of shoots to be completed in the competitions held. This concerns both the competition season, especially in the Biathlon World Cup, and the World Championships and Olympic Games carried out.
Thus, the distance to be ski increased by about 29.3% from the 1997/1998 competition season to the 2005/2006 competition season. In the same period, however, the number of shots to be fired during the competitions increased by around 49.2%.
In the competition seasons (includes the Biathlon World Cup, World Championships and the Olympic Games) from 2006/2007 to 2014/2015, the ratio of running performance to shooting performance remained almost constant. Since the 2015/2016 competition season, there has again been a significant jump in the ratio of skiing to shooting performance. This is mainly due to the introduction of the Single Mixed Relay competition form. In this competition, the individual athlete fires twice as many competition shots as, for example, in the normal Mixed Relay.
Conclusions
Thus, the importance of biathlon shooting within the framework of providing the complex biathlon performance has grown once again in recent years.
In order to achieve the desired competition result of 100% hits, it is necessary to have as much experience as possible. Every athlete can only gain this experience by firing as many training and competition shots as possible. Missing several thousand to ten thousand shots cannot be made up for even in the high performance range, even if it may seem so at first. Experience will prevail in more difficult conditions at the latest. This also applies to handling and handling reliability in the case of reloaders or in proper clearing of any kind of malfunctions.
A miss has an impact with penalty times of 1min, with penalty laps of up to 25sec or the time required for a reload of approx. 10sec. Trying to compensate for this with a better skiing performance is increasingly difficult with increasing performance density and means an enormously increased training effort.
With these facts in the background, I can only advise to follow a similarly mature training concept across all age groups and in all stages of the long-term performance development for the biathlon shooting training as in the skiing area. Of course, this also means a corresponding education and training of the trainers.
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